We applaud the authors’ impressive effort in compiling the Seshat database, as well as the remarkable Analytic Narratives they produced on supernatural punishment. This project undeniably helps the field advance towards testing historical predictions of cultural evolutionary theories—including by sparking key methodological discussions (Beheim et al., 2021; Slingerland et al., 2020). The target article’s findings, should they be confirmed (see Purzycki et al., 2022 this issue), bring important new information regarding the role of warfare, pastoralism, and agricultural productivity in predicting the rise moralizing religions.

We here focus on the measurement of moralizing religion. While previous research often used binary measures (eg, presence/absence of moralizing gods), the authors’ coding includes seven features, allowing to capture degrees of moralizing religion. This is particularly pleasing since a growing body of evidence suggest that belief in a least some form of supernatural punishment in fact recurs in small-scale societies—constituting a non-zero “baseline” of moralizing religion across societies of all scales (Bendixen et al., 2021; Fitouchi & Singh, 2022; Purzycki et al., 2020; Singh et al., 2021; Watts et al., 2015). The question of the rise of moralizing religion thus becomes: What factors drive the evolution of religion from this baseline—limited supernatural sanctions within a misfortune-centered religious ecology (Boyer, 2020; Singh et al., 2021)—to moralizing “big gods”(or karmic forces) whose moral concern is broader and primary. We suggest, however, that the authors’ measure still fails to capture the entire range of moralizing religions, and thus misses part of what is to be explained in the rise of moralizing religions. The most culturally successful “world religions”(eg, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism) are not just “big gods” religions, incentivizing cooperation through the threat of a broad, primary, certain, and targeted supernatural punishment. They instead appear more profoundly geared towards achieving the inner moral reform of individuals, by reshaping the self’s internal disposition to self-discipline and moral behavior (see Baumard et al., 2015a; Fitouchi et al., 2021a).